On Sat, Sep 3, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Michael Paquier <michael.paqu...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 5:57 AM, Vik Fearing <v...@2ndquadrant.fr> wrote: >> One thing that has been irking me ever since I came to PostgreSQL is the >> fact that pg_ctl -w (and -W) don't have longhand equivalents. I like to >> use the long version in scripts and such as extra documentation, and >> I've never been able to with these. What's more, I keep forgetting that >> --wait (and --no-wait) aren't a thing. >> >> Trivial patch attached. > > Nit: Like --nosync we could use --nowait, without an hyphen.
But is that actually better? I think that the idea of omitting the dash here is one of those things that sounds good at first, and then later you realize that it was actually a dumb idea all along. If somebody has an option for --body or --on or --table and has to negate it by running --nobody or --noon or --notable, some confusion may result, because in each case you get a word that is not really the logical inverse of the original option. Also, if you end up with any multi-word options, like --save-backup-files, then users wonder why the opposite, --nosave-backup-files, has a dash between words 2 and 3 and between words 3 and 4, but not between words 1 and 2. I suggest we'd do better to standardize on always including a dash in such cases. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
